“I was loved for a minute; and then I was hated; and then I was just a punchline”…and now you’re a terrible movie.
I remember clearly when the Tonya Harding skating scandal happened. I was only a child, but I can recall all the news stations covering every possible inch of the story they could, quickly turning fellow skater Nancy Kerrigan into a hero (an image she tarnished slightly thanks to her appearance at a Disney parade) and Harding the ultimate victim. To be honest, I didn’t care about it then, and I don’t care about it now. Yet the salacious story, and everything leading up to it, has been transformed into a trashy film which thinks it’s a biopic about a misunderstood figure many feel was unjustly vilified, yet whose current relevance doesn’t extend beyond the bounds of a trivial pursuit card. Did she know about it, the movie attempts to ask? Who cares? I’ve been struggling to find someone, anyone, remotely interested in seeing I, Tonya to no avail. No one wants to see this movie simply because no one asked for it. Presently, Harding enjoys a quiet life full of contentment, while Kerrigan has said in recent years that she herself is over the whole affair. Both women serve as key figures in the crux of I, Tonya; and if they’re not interested, why should we be?
I, Tonya attempts to tell the story of Tonya Harding (Margot Robbie), one of the top female American figure skaters of all-time, whose rise to Olympic stardom was cut short due to a reputation-shattering scandal. Through interviews with Tonya’s husband Jeff Gillooly (Sebastian Stan) and mother LaVona (Allison Janney), I, Tonya chronicles Tonya’s early beginnings as a child skater up to the moment everything fell apart.
There’s no getting around it; I, Tonya is the kind of campy mess you would expect it to be. The film follows the Mommie Dearest blueprint in its delusions as a serious film, even containing a scene which substitutes a hairbrush for wire hangers. The screenplay (which feels like it was written in the space of a weekend) offers both lead actresses the chance to inhabit Faye Dunaway’s incidentally iconic Joan Crawford role. There’s Tonya chasing Jeff down with a shotgun and her drag queen-like appearance caked with Joker-esque makeup as she stares into a mirror with tears streaming down her face right before a competition. The instance in which LaVona instructs Tonya to give her a goodbye kiss and a scene shortly after in which her mother accidentally stabs her is right out of British pantomime. Even the film’s music choices prove to be too on the nose as the filmmakers have them doing double duty in terms of characterization, such as using “Devil Woman” for one of Janney’s first appearances. In true camp fashion, I, Tonya’s script offers up plenty of laughable lines much in the way the aforementioned biopic did. “I am Americas best figure skater,” Tonya shouts at Jeff while the latter is unpacking groceries. “I don’t want an Eskimo Pie, I want a Dove Bar!” Such lines prove even funnier in the film’s ridiculous aims at realness. “You’re a monster,” Tonya exclaims to LaVona. “Spilled milk, baby,” LaVona replies as she takes one of the many drags from her seemingly endless amount of cigarettes. My prediction is that in the future there will be midnight screenings of I, Tonya held with audiences throwing Dove Bars and Eskimo Pies at the screen and everyone laughing at the various characters and their hysterics in the way they deserve to be.
I, Tonya has a spectacularly good shot at going down in history as one of the most undeserving biopics ever made. “Generally, people either love Tonya or they are not big fans,” Tonya’s coach Diane (Julianne Nicholson) states at the beginning of the film, almost bracing the audience for the sort of caustic figure they are going to spend the next two hours with. I’ve always felt that a character within a film doesn’t have to be likable as long as they’re interesting. Unfortunately for the movie, Tonya’s neither. I remember seeing Harding interviewed on a documentary about her life some years back. At one point she literally justified a domestic abuse charge brought on her by her second husband because he approached her before she’d had her morning coffee. In the same show, she was later shown crying to the camera about how she’s still being unfairly persecuted in the court of public opinion. Even in the eyes of those who have not seen that documentary, or were alive during the time of the scandal, it’s clear that everyone in this film is a loser; not because of their social status, but because they’re all so pathetic and genuinely misguided in their values and intentions. There’s literally nothing redeeming about any person depicted here, at least nothing that the movie cares to show. The thing is, I, Tonya knows its subject is a laughable hot mess, capable of being nothing else, and as a result the film itself cannot be anything but hot mess devoid of pathos, integrity, and anything resembling a quality film. Even the clunky attempts to sympathize Tonya as a battered wife fail when it’s shown she gave back as good as she got, proving her and Jeff deserved each other in the same way as nitro and glycerin. At a certain point you can’t help but ask yourself: How many times does the movie need to show these two losers tear each other apart? A lot, since I, Tonya has little else going for it outside the rink.
To her credit, Robbie is giving the role her all, confirming her status as an actress willing to devote herself fully to any character she’s presented with. There’s not any one moment in the whole horrendous experience when she isn’t taking Tonya as far and as deep as is possible for the kind of woman she’s portraying. If only the woman she’s portraying was worthy of her level of commitment. For his part, Stan borders between playing it straight (doing decent work in the process) while at other times struggling to keep up with the camp fest surrounding him. Finally, Janney is like a white trash Cruella de Vil, never once kidding herself with the notion that she’s making art. Instead, the actress eagerly dives into the outrageousness of the film in the spirit of true kabuki theater.
The makers of I, Tonya (which include Robbie, who serves as one of the film’s producers) do try to find a creative angle by shooting their characters in interview fashion and having Tonya occasionally breaking the fourth wall and addressing the audience throughout the film. None of this helps in trying to shake the film’s TV movie subject or disguise its overall lack of cinematic finesse. What makes this especially sad is that I, Tonya is perhaps the most Oscar-hungry movie of the year. The film is so desperate to be taken seriously, or at the very least come off as semi-credible, that its yearning for Oscar gold becomes as almost as laughable and relentless as its main character’s quest for Olympic glory. Maybe my reading of the film is base, but no more than the characters or the movie’s attempts to get to know them. For me, the reason for the film’s acclaim and popularity is simply because it’s a car crash that its creators and admirers are trying to twist into art. Personally, I’ve never really been one of those people to stop and look at a car crash while driving along the freeway. I’ve usually got better things to do.
I, Tonya opened with a limited release on December 8, 2017, and is expanding into additional theaters in January 2018.
